Kuwait on the Prairie

Can North Dakota solve the energy problem?

A crew in the Williston Basin, which contains billions of barrels of oil—enough to supply the country for years, if it can be safely extracted. The boom, one resident said, has brought “free money.” Photograph by Thomas Struth.

North Dakota is booming. Its unemployment rate is the lowest in the country, 3.7 per cent, and so many people have moved there for jobs that last year local officials declared a housing crisis. The new workers have been drawn by the Williston Basin, in the western part of the state, which holds the largest accumulation of oil identified in North America since 1968, when the Prudhoe Bay field was found, on the North Slope of Alaska. Oil companies have booked motels within two hours’ drive for a year in advance; last summer, relocated workers converted the lawn of a town park into a tent city.

About a hundred new wells are blasted into the ground every month. Seen from a distance on U.S. Highway 2, the derricks form a straight crease—giants reduced to props by a landscape that the novelist Larry Woiwode described as a vast plane, “its flatness tugging the sky tight at every horizon, as if it were tied there.” One day a few months ago, beside a trailer parked near the center of the basin, half a dozen men prepared to send enough explosives underground to dismantle an armored tank. The firepower consisted of twenty-four “shaped charges”—little cone-shaped shells housed in foot-long metal cannisters called perforating guns. When the charges were detonated by an electrical signal, each shell would explode into the surrounding rock, forming corridors through which oil could flow into the well.

The workers, who were mostly in their twenties or thirties, wore hard hats, steel-toed boots, and coveralls stained to the chest with crude oil. One of them screwed four perforating guns together, attached them to a heavy wire, then lowered them into a hole bored in the ground. As the wire unspooled from an enormous drum mounted on the back of the trailer, another man, inside, used a joystick to control the guns’ descent. It took almost an hour before the guns neared the far end of the L-shaped wellbore, an underground trip of nearly four miles, and began to withdraw. A third worker knelt on the floor of the trailer like a preacher and studied a column of numbers written on a window, down-hole distances where the men were to set off the explosions: 19,971 feet, then 19,909, then 19,850. On closed-circuit radio, a voice from a trailer across the lot addressed the worker on the joystick: “Steady, keep it steady.”

“He’s got to have a doctor’s touch on that drum wire,” the engineer in charge of the well, Russell Rankin, said. Rankin, who was clean-shaven and had on a class ring and a carefully ironed golf shirt, works for Brigham Exploration, based in Austin, Texas, one of some hundred and fifty oil companies that have entered the basin since 2006. “Everybody sent up here is on the same mission, which is: Solve the puzzle of this place,” Rankin said. “We know there’s oil there. But how much of it can you get out of the rock?”

The rock is the Bakken formation, a layer of the basin that geologists believe holds a twenty-five-thousand-square-mile sea of oil. (The formation is mostly beneath the surface of North Dakota, but it extends into Montana and Canada.) The head of the state’s department of mineral resources, Lynn Helms, recently estimated that the region could contain eleven billion barrels of oil that can be obtained using current technology, nearly enough to supply the United States for two years. That assessment has doubled since a 2008 United States Geological Survey study, and the amount that will eventually be recoverable is the subject of intense speculation. “The Williston Basin is still relatively underexplored and poorly understood in terms of its geology,” Helms said. “It’s a subterranean detective story.”

A hundred and thirteen million barrels of crude oil were produced in North Dakota last year—more than five per cent of the country’s domestic output. (The U.S. produces slightly less than half of the oil it consumes.) The increase is well timed. Last month, with oil prices rising, President Obama announced the goal of reducing by one-third America’s reliance on foreign oil by 2025. But the restrictions on offshore drilling that followed the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill have limited domestic oil production, and the disastrous blowup at Japan’s Fukushima plant last month has made an increase in nuclear power politically untenable. Meanwhile, the past two years were the first since 1991 in which domestic oil production increased, owing substantially to North Dakota’s contributions. Geologists believe that Williston could be at the beginning of a twenty-year boom.

When the perforation guns were lined up at the proper depth, the man on his knees placed his hands on a wall panel that held knobs, dials, switches, and a key in a keyhole. “Plug it?” he asked. Rankin nodded, and he gently turned the key. A few seconds later, the needles of a meter bounced abruptly. A worker who stood hugging a vertical pipe near the wellhead gave a thumbs-up, to indicate that he had felt a rumble from the faraway explosion. In the trailer, all was quiet.

Oil companies often name their wells after the family that owns the surrounding land, and, because this part of the state was settled overwhelmingly by Norwegian immigrants and their descendants, the well names have a certain uniformity of character: the Erickson, the Sorenson, the Mortenson, the Tjelde, the Bakke, the Brakken. Rankin’s new well was registered with the North Dakota Industrial Commission as the Abe, after Abe Owan, a local businessman, on whose property Brigham had already installed the Owan, the Abe Owan, and the Owan-Nehring. “Abe’s got a lot of land, and we’re starting to run out of names,” Rankin said.

Rankin is the principal engineer and overseer of Brigham’s wells in the Bakken. In 2010, he was made responsible for much of the company’s four-hundred-million-dollar budget and was put in charge of hiring all the rig contractors and work crews involved. By August, he and his wife and sons had moved from Austin to Williston. For the time being, they live in a trailer in the company’s equipment yard. Rankin considers his wells “not exactly like my kids, but let’s say close enough.” In a span of just four days a few months ago, he met with dozens of service providers—pipeline construction, solids disposal, right-of-way acquisition, electrical supply, pumping units—along with the mayor of Williston, the director of economic development, and officers of the state land department. One morning, he told everybody he hadn’t yet seen to meet him at the big table at Trapper’s Kettle for breakfast, and they took turns sitting next to him.

Rankin is thirty-eight, six feet tall, and broad in the beam. He has a high forehead and wears large eyeglasses, which together give the appearance that he is always about to ask politely if you’ve got a minute. He grew up in Marietta, Oklahoma, where his father worked as an insurance agent and his mother taught business math to middle-school students. He liked fossils: “I was always picking things up on camping trips—small crustaceans, because Oklahoma was once a shallow sea, during the Cretaceous period.” He wanted to become a military pilot, and applied to the Air Force Academy, but his vision wasn’t good enough. “The people who don’t see well, they usually make them into computer programmers, so I got an engineering scholarship to the University of Oklahoma,” he said. “Pretty quickly, if you’re studying engineering in Oklahoma, the oil companies come for you.”

An out-of-town oilman in North Dakota can be met with a degree of suspicion, and Rankin says that the people he meets often “expect J. R. Ewing in a designer suit and cowboy boots, with a big-shot belt buckle.” But he retains the deferential manner of a mid-level petroleum engineer. Sometimes, on the way to an appointment, he’ll check his reflection in the car mirror and declare, “That’s good enough for the girls I go with.”

At Brigham’s headquarters, in Austin, Rankin’s superiors regard his earnestness with amusement, smiling at one another when he enters a brief meeting armed with giant maps, delineated by seismography, topography, and land-ownership. He is so compulsive about the execution of his wells that, before the ground is broken, he has all the thirty-foot joints of steel pipe that will make up the wellbore stacked neatly in the order that he plans to install them—from one to seven hundred, give or take. Brigham is gambling a great deal on the success of these wells. It has acquired the rights to nearly four hundred thousand acres in the Williston “play,” as oil prospects are called, and has a roster of more than a thousand new wells to drill between now and 2021. “Since the end of 2008, we’ve moved about ninety-five per cent of our money out of projects in Texas and the Gulf Coast and into the Williston Basin,” Ben (Bud) Brigham, the company’s founder, said. “We’ve kind of taken the all-or-nothing position.”

Around noon on April 4, 1951, Andrew (Blackie) Davidson, the drilling superintendent on a wildcat well east of Williston, set fire to a rag and flung it in the air. He watched as its trajectory met an invisible stream of natural gas that emanated from the ground, sending a flare thirty feet into the sky; by nightfall, it could be seen ten miles away. There was oil in North Dakota.

This was the state’s first producing well, the Clarence Iverson No. 1. Davidson had been sent up from Oklahoma by Amerada Petroleum, and he and his crew became local heroes. “I never thought I’d be so important in my whole life,” Leon (Tude) Gordon, who bottled the state’s first pint of oil, recalled. “Blackie and I could’ve run for mayor if we’d wanted.” Time devoted a cover story to Amerada’s find, and by the end of the year prospectors had secured leases on almost two-thirds of the land in North Dakota. The Clarence Iverson No. 1 recovered nearly six hundred thousand barrels in the next three decades, and enabled Clarence Iverson himself, the wheat farmer who owned the land and the drilling rights beneath the well, to “pretty much retire” at the age of forty-four, his son Cliff told me. Of his parents’ activities since then, Cliff said, “They went to visit their relatives in Minnesota is about all they done.”

More discoveries followed, and several formations within the Williston Basin were identified as oil-bearing zones. But, because the world was then running a surplus of crude oil, the state imposed strict quotas on North Dakota’s wells. “We have oil running out of our ears,” an Amerada executive said at the time. Later booms worked out no better. In 1973, panic over the OPEC embargo set off another short-term drilling bonanza, and a large share of the local population took jobs in the oil field. “The second boom was bigger, but it ended much worse, because of all the locals who decided to join up,” Ed Grandbois, an equipment salesman in Williston, told me. “When the companies pulled out, a lot of people said, ‘I’m leaving, and if I can get a steady job I’m not coming back.’ ”

In Elwyn Robinson’s definitive “History of North Dakota,” the author notes a recurring pattern of geographic disappointment: the land has always fallen short of people’s expectations. Early settlers mistook the subhumid Missouri Plateau, which occupies the western half of the state, for the same fertile ground that was being farmed successfully in the East. The state was built virtually overnight by overeager railroad lines and by Minnesota’s flour-milling corporations. They brought prosperity, but also higher land prices than many farmers could afford. All of it created resentment; the state was a “colonial hinterland” of the Twin Cities, Robinson wrote, its resources and citizens “patronized and belittled.” The population, estimated at sixteen thousand in 1878, grew to almost six hundred thousand by 1910 and has remained more or less constant ever since.

In 1953, J. W. Nordquist, a geologist for Phillips Petroleum, established that there was oil in a three-hundred-and-sixty-million-year-old formation which he named for the Bakken family, whose farm, near Williston, was the site of his discovery. He took note of the formation’s unusual, three-tiered composition, which he characterized as “an Oreo cookie”: sandwiched between two layers of black shale was a thin and elusive layer of dolomite, where the oil lay. But for decades the Bakken was ignored. The shale was considered too “tight,” or lacking the adequate porosity, to justify the expense of drilling.

A commercial breakthrough came in 2000, after Richard Findley, an oil explorationist who had analyzed old well logs, became convinced that large sections of the Bakken on the Montana side of the basin contained considerable amounts of accessible oil. He persuaded a small outfit called Lyco to drill. “Dick called it ‘Sleeping Giant’ when he brought it to us,” Michael Lewis, the project’s supervising geologist, told me. Although the play, which became known as the Elm Coulee field, has since produced about a hundred million barrels of oil, most people in the industry considered it a one-off, Lewis said. “Nobody thought the rest of the Bakken was anything like it.”

The most influential dissenting opinion came from Leigh Price, a geochemist at the U.S.G.S. field office in Denver, who produced a radically optimistic assessment of the Bakken’s total reserves. Price had studied the formation for decades and had come to regard it as fundamentally different from other petroleum sources. One theory of modern geology holds that most of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves were generated in six vast “source rock” formations—typically, layers of the ocean floor where, during six distinct geologic periods, organic matter was subsumed rapidly into the earth, and eventually matured into oil or gas. Historically, prospectors were able to recover oil only after it migrated away from source rock; although much of the oil simply dispersed, a relatively small amount trickled upward into reservoirs, nearer the surface, where it can be more easily recovered.

In 1994, the Williston region’s oil industry was focussed on such a reservoir: the Madison, a limy formation that sits on top of the Bakken. Most geologists believed that the oil had seeped up from the Bakken, directly underneath. But, as Price and Julie LeFever, a geologist for the state, began comparing rock samples from various locations in the Williston Basin, they found themselves unable to correlate the Bakken and the Madison; the two are “compositionally distinct,” Price and LeFever wrote. They could only conclude that the oil Nordquist found in the Bakken had never migrated anywhere; all of it remained enclosed. In 1999, Price submitted for peer review a paper that calculated an astonishing mean of four hundred and thirteen billion barrels of oil in place. The Middle Bakken layer—the filling of the Oreo—was full of natural fractures that appeared to hold oil the way a sponge holds water. In an unsupported bit of speculation, he estimated that at least half the reserves could be cost-effectively recovered—an amount close to the combined capacity of Iraq and Kuwait.

The findings were controversial. Price, an avid weight-lifter who wore his hair in a ponytail, was regarded by colleagues as arrogant, and it didn’t help that, in the article, he boasted of its “staggering conclusion.” Wallace Dow, a geochemist who had done influential research on source rock in the Bakken, said, “I never bought his computation methods; they were too high, but he liked to be the radical.” Though he and Price were friends, he said, “people worried that Leigh and I were about to come to fisticuffs once at a petroleum meeting when we argued about it. I told him, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ ” The U.S.G.S. declined to publish the paper. Price died in 2000, of a heart attack.

By coincidence, a short time later Robert Coskey, a geologist in Denver who was developing software to build models of oil basins, phoned the local U.S.G.S. office to inquire about the available data on the Williston Basin. “I just wanted some demo data to plug in for a formation—I wasn’t even looking for oil,” Coskey recalled. “I asked for Price, and they said, ‘You just missed him.’ ” The U.S.G.S. allowed Coskey to look through files in Price’s office, where he discovered the research on the Bakken. Coskey told me, “When I plugged in his numbers, it didn’t even look like an oil field, they were so huge.”

For Brigham Exploration, the decade before Coskey’s analysis had often been frustrating. The company had drilled five hundred wells, with a discovery rate more than three times the industry average, but it struggled with volatile energy prices and an overly ambitious drilling schedule. “The history of our company seems like we were always one big well away from success,” Rankin said.

Bud Brigham is a slight, gentle man of fifty-one, with a boyish mop of straw-colored hair. He grew up in the oil-patch town of Midland, Texas, where his father was an oil-and-gas attorney and his mother worked for Cy Wagner, a high-profile wildcatter. At the University of Texas, he discovered Ayn Rand (a sticker on his Audi S.U.V. reads “Who Is John Galt?”) and geophysics. He went into business with his wife, Anne, a geologist and a lawyer, and built a reputation for skillfully deploying a mapping technique called 3-D seismic imaging to pinpoint hydrocarbon deposits in areas with little margin for error.

In 2005, as Brigham labored at traditional exploration work—“searching hunt-and-peck,” as he put it—other operators were having success in natural-gas fields. These were “resource plays”—large formations, easy to find but stubborn to extract from—that had recently been made viable by new recovery technologies. Brigham said, “If you can unlock the reservoir, it becomes more like mining or a factory.” He was envious, he told me. “We were watching our peers get rich off it.”

That year, he instructed his staff to scour the country for a resource play, and in the summer a Brigham delegation attended a trade show in Houston and found a booth advertising a deal in the Bakken formation. A company from Denver wanted to unload forty-six thousand acres. Oil resource plays like the Bakken are rare, Brigham said—more lucrative than natural gas but also more challenging, because oil molecules move less easily through rock fractures. “We ended up getting it for about a hundred dollars an acre,” Jeff Larson, Brigham’s head of exploration, said. “The Bakken was a little too wild for them.”

It was a gamble. Around that time, the director of a research center at the University of North Dakota got hold of Leigh Price’s paper and posted it on the Internet, where it began to attract interest. But nobody had successfully drilled that part of the Bakken. Elm Coulee, the Montana discovery, was forty miles away, and its oil was contained in a neat rock trap at the edge of the basin. “Our acreage was in the center of the basin, no traps,” Pat Medlock, a Brigham geologist, said. “But that gave us a nice thickness of Middle Bakken”—the promising center of the Oreo.

The next year, Brigham drilled three wells in North Dakota, and the results were discouraging. “They were poor wells,” Rankin said. By Brigham’s estimate, a Bakken well needs an initial production rate of four hundred barrels a day in order to be viable. These came in at around two hundred, and, Rankin says, “we cooled down in a hurry.” Many in Williston thought the company’s acreage was barren. Rankin recalled, “People kept asking us, ‘What the hell are you doing there? It’s a graveyard.’ ”

At the time, the industry was combining two innovative techniques to extract oil from difficult sources like the Bakken. One, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” involves pumping water and chemicals into a well under such pressure that cracks form in the surrounding rock and release hydrocarbons. About three million gallons of water and chemicals are injected into the bore over the weeklong course of a fracturing treatment, along with four million pounds of “proppant”—sand and tiny ceramic beads that get inside the fractures and prop them open to allow oil or gas to flow.

The other technique, horizontal drilling, prepares a well for fracking by extending the wellbore laterally through the pay zone—the oil-rich part of a rock bed. The Middle Bakken layer is thin—between ten and fifty feet thick through most of the basin—which makes it all but impossible for a vertical well to gain purchase. At a restaurant one night, Rankin demonstrated the principle for me, using a drinking straw from a glass of iced tea. “This here’s the wellbore, and this is vertical,” he said, sinking the straw down through the face of a quarter loaf of garlic bread, which represented oil-bearing rock. The straw was in contact with bread through only a small area, from the top of the piece to the bottom. “Now, if I’m a horizontal well and I’m making a long lateral, look at this.” He poked the straw sideways into the bread and out the tapering heel, permitting the well to tunnel the long way through the pay zone. “You get two miles of pay.”

Horizontal drilling has become extraordinarily precise. “If your house was ten thousand feet underground, these guys could bring a drill bit through the front door and out the back,” an oil-industry blogger wrote last year. Increasingly sophisticated sensors provide hundreds of calculations per minute as a drill bores ahead, dictating the angle at which to adjust the bit in order to maintain a graceful curve that won’t kink the pipe. Still, a lot of guessing is involved with a new play. “It’s science, but it’s also an art form,” Rankin said one day at the Boots, another well that he was putting in. We were watching members of the mud-logging crew, who followed the drill’s progress by analyzing the rocks it spit out. With every wormlike advance of thirty feet the wellbore made, one of the crew members was sent to collect fresh cuttings, which were expelled from a pipe and collected in a metal tank called a possum belly.

“The cuttings tell us where the bit is—whatever just reached the surface, they’re the last thing the drill ate,” the mud-logging supervisor, Kathy Neset, told me in her lab, a trailer stationed beside the rig. “Oil-bearing rock will glow if we put it under ultraviolet light. A good well, the sample bag will be dripping oil.” She handed me a gray nugget of Middle Bakken rock that had been kicked to the surface. It was dense, heavy, and generally unremarkable; it didn’t look as if it could possibly be porous enough to contain oil. “You see what they mean by tight rock?” Neset said.

Neset, a handsome blond woman, may be the only mud-logger in the state to wear gold earrings and a cashmere cardigan sweater on a rig. She had arrived in the Williston Basin in 1979, after she graduated from Brown with a geology degree. “I remember Meridian Exploration coming in the eighties and trying to drill an early horizontal,” she said. “Horizontal was so secretive then. They sent a guy out here with a briefcase of drilling instructions and he wouldn’t let it leave his hand.” She said the most difficult part now isn’t finding the pay zone but staying in it for the length of the lateral. “The Middle Bakken doesn’t follow a truly flat line, because there are up-dips and down-dips—a wavy line,” Neset said. “If the bit moves out of the pay and you’re getting back Oreo-cookie shales instead of the center, it’s tough to know if you need to correct high or correct low.” If you miss your target, a driller on the Boots said, “you have to bring out your ‘big gray eraser.’ That’s cement.”

When Brigham entered the Bakken, its staff was made up mostly of exploration men—geologists and geophysicists—and some of them dismissed resource plays as the abandonment of the wildcatter spirit; Jeff Larson, the Brigham explorationist, derided the engineering work as “a lot of blocking and tackling.” Rankin was assigned to the Bakken project because he was one of only half a dozen engineers at the company. To complement his technical knowledge, he hoped to enlist Mitchel Brown, a freelance horizontal-drilling expert he had worked with briefly a decade earlier.

Brown is a sawed-off shotgun of a man, with a high, excitable voice and mismatched eyes—one blue and one eggplant-colored, since an accident, in 1990, when a hose on a rig collapsed and sprayed hydraulic fluid in his face. “Shredded iris and retinal detachment,” he told me. “Four months’ workers’ comp.” Brown held his first job on a rig at fourteen, in Oklahoma, where his father was a professional trap-shooter. Later, on deployments to Alaska, the Ivory Coast, and the Indian Ocean, he specialized in snubbing—forcing pipe into a well, against pressure, to perform repairs. Now, with his own consulting business, he earns more than three hundred thousand dollars a year, working eight or nine months. At first, Brown wasn’t interested in joining Rankin in North Dakota. “It’s too cold,” he said. But he finally assented. He had been hearing about the unrealized potential of the Williston Basin, he said, and “I decided I like a challenge.”

The two of them made an odd couple. Where Rankin obsessed over weights and measures, Brown, who is forty-five, relied on an intuitive ability to visualize the physical relationship a wellbore has to its setting. “You’ve got to put yourself in the hole,” he told me. “I had an old guy tell me that once, and I thought, Now, how the hell does he do that?” He once ran a video camera down a wire to diagnose a damaged well. “It was just like your eyeball was in the wellbore. The water was flooding right past.” Brown described Rankin as “one of the most open-minded drilling engineers I’ve met”—a rather backhanded compliment. But, he acknowledged, “Russell is one of those people that can put himself in the hole.”

Both men were frustrated by their initial drilling in the Bakken. “I fought with the first few wells,” Brown said. He worried that Brigham was going to pull out, and told Rankin to let his boss know that they needed time and money to experiment. Brigham agreed to budget them sixty million dollars for a year of drilling. Brown and his wife, Helen, moved their R.V. from Oklahoma to Williston, and, eventually, his son and son-in-law joined them. “We’re gypsies, anyway,” Helen Brown told me.

The low production of the wells, Brown said, indicated a need for not only more muscle but also more precision. They were trying to frack the entire lateral portion of the wellbore at once, with a single burst of pressurized fluid. Rankin explained, “The action is ten thousand feet underground, and you have no idea where in the whole thing the fractures are.”

To solve this problem, operators had attempted to divide a wellbore into segments, using fibreglass plugs, so that each stage could be fractured separately. But multistage fracks were unreliable, Brown said: “People called them fancy fracks, because they cost more but didn’t work.” Plugs got stuck in the well, or they failed to hold their place. He added, “You’d try them and still couldn’t be sure if they did a damn thing.” Indeed, the next four wells that he and Rankin built in 2006 used seven stages each, but their production was not significantly better.

That summer, word spread through the basin that EOG Resources, a company from Houston, had sunk an enormous well seventy miles southeast of Williston. When EOG submitted the results to the state, as required by law, Rankin saw that the well had an initial production estimate of about a thousand barrels a day—and that it had been fractured in five stages. EOG had pulled off a fancy frack better than anybody else. But how? “Their guys are very tight-lipped, and for a while nobody could find out,” Rankin said.

The oil industry accepts a certain amount of corporate espionage as part of doing business: companies spy on one another’s wells to see which areas are producing and what methods work. The Brigham land department began to follow where EOG was leasing, and obtained the rights to small portions on the same lots—sometimes as little as an acre within a two-square-mile parcel. Because the two companies technically shared the lots, EOG was legally obligated to allow Brigham to buy into its wells—and thus had to provide details of how the wells were administered. “They still weren’t easy,” Rankin recalled. “I’d ask for their report and I’d get, ‘Oh, I have a call in on that,’ or ‘Let me see if it’s ready yet.’ But eventually they have to comply.”

It took a year for EOG’s secret to emerge. “We found out they were using swell packers” to divide the well into sections, Brown said. Swell packers are spongelike tubes, not much larger than a rolling pin, coated in a rubber compound that swells when it comes into contact with hydrocarbons. As they expand, they seal the wellbore more efficiently, increasing the pressure of the fracking fluid. “We went and redid an early well that we’d abandoned—as a seven-frack instead of a one-frack—using the swell packers,” Lance Langford, a Brigham executive, said. The cost of the well went up by fifty per cent, but its production increased nearly fourfold. “When we saw the flow, we shut it down after six hours,” Langford said. “We didn’t want anybody to see how big the flare was until we bought up more acres.”

Brown and Rankin’s wells continued to utilize more stages—ten, twelve, and more. Rankin said, “The wells weren’t getting longer—the frack sections were getting shorter.” Their production rate jumped again when they extended the horizontal section of the wellbore from five thousand feet to ten thousand and continued adding more frack sections. Rankin said, “A year ago, people said it was too risky to have a twenty-frack job. Now we’re doing forty.” Last year, Brigham’s wells had an average initial production rate of nearly three thousand barrels a day—the highest among its competitors. The utility of combining a multi-frack with a long lateral has become an article of faith in the Bakken. “Now everybody here copycats us on that,” Rankin said.

The public playground in the middle of Williston recently underwent a four-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar upgrade, courtesy of the oil companies. The new equipment includes a jungle gym with towers designed to look like Halliburton oil derricks, a seesaw that resembles a Brigham pump jack, and a tunnel for children to crawl in that bears the name and logo of Enbridge, a pipeline operator. Williston’s downtown is quiet—a dingy precinct of Victorian-era limestone storefronts—but the business routes that stretch toward the drilling fields are lined with proliferating warehouses, dispatching centers, and equipment showrooms. Kyle Hexom, whose family owns a well-site-construction business, told me, “Between booms, there were some really lean times for my dad.” Now, he said, the company didn’t have enough trucks for the jobs it was offered.

The town’s population has grown in the past decade from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand, overwhelming Williston’s housing stock. “We’ve got two new developments that are being built,” Ward Koeser, the town’s mayor, said one morning at city hall. “The rest of what we want to do for now is a combination of short-term residences and medium-term.” These are euphemisms for “man camps”: motels or clusters of trailers that house laborers in large numbers. Eight have recently gone up around Williston.

The man camps are a source of some tension between the oil industry and established residents—the Williston Herald regularly gets comments from readers lamenting the town’s “ghettos” and their constituency of “oil-field trash.” But they are a familiar sight in Williston, and workers say that the atmosphere is largely peaceful. “In your twelve hours off, after you do your clothes and eat supper, all you do is sleep anyway,” Jon Grounds, who lives in a three-hundred-bed camp, said. He was walking from his quarters—a long trailer containing twenty single rooms, each with a flat-screen TV mounted above the bed—to the chow hall. Grounds, who is thirty, works as a roughneck for fourteen consecutive days, then drives several hours to Zap, North Dakota, to spend two weeks at home. “It’s not that hard—except when you’re up on the rig you’ve got to eat a sandwich on a string,” he said. “I think I’m gonna make a career out of it.”

Leaving aside the risk of auditory damage—hearing aids are ubiquitous among rig workers over forty—and the threat of injury from mishandled explosives, the work is attractive. Sammy Farnham, a lanky, red-faced man who operates perforating guns, arrived with his wife three years ago, when he was having a hard time finding construction work in South Carolina. “We got here on a Saturday, and I had a job Tuesday morning,” he said. Farnham made seventy thousand dollars in the first five months of the year and was expecting two bonus payouts of as much as thirty thousand dollars each, “when things get really busy.” He had already paid off his house and car. “My manager made three hundred and twenty thousand dollars last year, just for running the truck.”

One afternoon, as Rankin and I drove through the Parshall oil field, east of Williston, he pointed out a big contemporary house with a vaulted glass entryway. “New home,” he said. “New car, new boat. New wife, probably.” Residents claim that Bakken money has largely been spent on modes of transport or reinvested in the land. More than one person expressed interest in buying a new combine, which can cost three hundred thousand dollars. Richard Nelson, a sixty-six-year-old construction company employee, told me that he’d started playing mineral rights when they were a dollar an acre. “Now,” he said, “I’ve got a few acres with multiple wells. I could show you some checks in my car.”

Much of the basin is under contract, but people who still hold parcels can lease out their mineral rights for annual payments of as much as three thousand dollars per acre, in addition to a twenty-per-cent stake in the oil that’s produced. A moderately productive plot of two square miles could bring the owners—typically, groups of relatives and speculators—a million dollars up front, and five hundred thousand dollars a year for two decades. Ron Gerwien, who owns a sandblasting operation, said that “a changing of the weather” occurred when a major oil field began producing near Stanley, an hour’s drive from Williston. “Up until now, the two families that had all the money were always the banker and the telephone-company operator.”

The intermediaries whom oil companies rely on during mineral-rights transactions are called land men. Brigham’s land department moved a team of seventy to Williston, and also keeps a local man named John Schmitz on retainer to handle sensitive land deals with townspeople. “I don’t do geology—I do clan-ology,” Schmitz told me one evening, when he and his wife, Cathy, brought me to their country club for dinner. “I’m third-generation Williston, from a wheat farm, just like them.” Brigham called on him when an agreement with Abe Owan was endangered. Apparently, a young in-house land man, up from Texas, had tried to fast-talk Owan into accepting a low payment. Owan asked him to leave the premises. Cathy said, “The good-ol’-boy shit is not going to work here.”

“Abe knew my dad for decades,” Schmitz said. “He insisted on a higher price than I was allowed to say yes to, but I knew he wouldn’t go lower.” Brigham assented, and Schmitz closed the deal.

Both Schmitzes were standout athletes at Williston High, and Cathy is a prominent lawyer in town. “I started buying minerals for myself after the second boom, when nobody wanted them,” Schmitz said. “I had a hunch it wasn’t done yet.” He began by courting the neighbors of his old family farm, which overlooks the Missouri River. “I knew these people, and none of them were particularly wealthy,” he said. “I would tell them to sell me half and keep half for themselves.”

“It literally is free money,” Cathy said.

Oilmen often attribute the accelerated growth in the Bakken to what Bud Brigham calls North Dakota’s “conducive regulatory climate.” Hydraulic fracturing has become enormously controversial, and other plays throughout the country are being slowed by concerns that fracking accidents have contaminated drinking water. “Gasland,” an anti-fracking documentary that was nominated for an Oscar this year, showed residents of Colorado whose tap water contained so much methane gas—apparently from leaking wells underfoot—that a cigarette lighter held to a spigot set the water on fire. The Environmental Protection Agency’s last official study of fracking, in 2004, concluded that it poses “little or no threat” to water-supply safety, but the report was faulted for relying too heavily on scientists employed by the oil industry. The agency set up a new study and expects to deliver its initial results by the end of 2012.

Fracking’s public image has probably not been helped by a regulatory loophole that, until recently, enabled the producers of fracturing fluid to keep its contents secret. According to a study commissioned last year by Tudor Pickering Holt, an investment bank that focusses on the energy industry, the fluid is “99.5 percent water.” The rest is a combination of, among other substances, guar gum (used in cosmetics and ice cream), isopropanol (glass cleaner), potassium chloride (salt substitute), ethylene glycol (antifreeze), and various acids used to clean swimming pools.

Proponents point out that hydraulic fracturing has been common in oil fields for sixty years and is currently used in perhaps eighty per cent of America’s gas wells. “The use of old, poorly cemented wells—not fracking—is what can cause stray gas to leak into the water supply,” Terry Engelder, a geologist at Penn State who has often defended the technique, told me. “That’s something you’ll find with any type of underground well, even a water well.” However, “there have been instances of chemicals spilling in aboveground accidents,” he said. “The industry has to do a better job of mitigating risk.”

Lynn Helms, the chief mineral-resources regulator in North Dakota, told me, “There are some legitimate risks to simply getting frack chemicals to the well. You’ve got thirty gallons of biohazard at a well site that can be very dangerous in its concentrated form.” In November, after there were two spills at well sites in North Dakota (neither of which, apparently, contaminated the public water supply), Helms requested funding to hire twenty additional inspectors.

On the other hand, Helms said, because the fracturing of the Bakken formation takes place nearly two miles below the aquifers, the risk of underground contamination is “as close to scientifically impossible as anything can be said to be.” Even some of the state’s most prominent opponents of fracking concede as much, and, in any case, their concerns are outmatched by the prospect of so much oil money. “Oil is very popular, and the economy here is a long-suffering agricultural economy,” Mark Trechock, the director of the Dakota Resource Council, said; the council has frequently called for fracking to be more strictly regulated.

Since the U.S.G.S. study in 2008, further estimates have begun to bear out Leigh Price’s figures, suggesting total reserves of as much as three hundred billion barrels and, perhaps more important, increasingly optimistic recovery rates, which have swelled from one per cent to as much as ten per cent. “We’ve seen a massive change in just the past few months,” Stephen Richardson, an energy-business analyst at Morgan Stanley, said. “It’s the maturation of the play: twice as many rigs as a year ago.”

Pete Stark, a geologist at the energy-consulting firm IHS, recently forecast that the output of the Williston Basin will double in the next five years. “We may not find another Bakken, but the techniques have led us into seven or eight new oil plays,” in Texas, Colorado, and elsewhere, Stark said. Taken together, the new reservoirs are expected to raise domestic production by as much as two million barrels a day. “That’s not quite energy security, but suddenly now you’re talking about an offset of twenty per cent of imported crude,” Stark said. “Every oil company in the country is looking at their source rock to see if they can crack the code.”

Back at the Abe well, a radio system that connected the vehicles came on: “Pressure’s up. We’re ready to start the frack.” Rankin flung open the heavy door of a trailer marked “Central Command” and took his place beside five members of the fracturing crew. They wore red jumpsuits and headsets, and they sat before a desk containing a double row of computer monitors and snacks for the twelve-hour shift: Goldfish, lemon coolers, peanut butter, a bag of precooked shrimp.

Outside, fracking equipment surrounded the hole in the ground in a tableau that resembled a split lobster: at the perimeter, the hard red shell of trucks bearing triplex pumps, mixers, and tanks; in the middle, the dirty green guts, composed of intercoiled pipes, hoses, and valves. A worker leaned over the wellhead and unceremoniously dropped in a black plastic ball not much bigger than a walnut. “Down the hole,” Rankin said. The ball was going to be swept through the wellbore until, within the hour, its path was blocked by a fibreglass plug. “The ball will seat there and begin to divert the frack fluid,” he explained. Then the fluid would enter the rock formation via the perforations made earlier by the guns. “You know the rest. Pumping fractures rock. Fluid invades fracks. Oil comes to Papa.”

Something called “slick water” was the first substance poured in. “It’s got an additive that cuts down on friction, so it moves faster,” Rankin said. One computer screen listed, in various colors, the concentration levels of the compounds that would be mixed into the slurry. When the ball encountered the plug, a computerized graph indicated that pressure inside the well was spiking. Two workers pushed buttons that sent about twenty tons of proppant sand from a bus-size bin into the wellhead. The sand would be flushed into the fractures and would hold them open. In about fifteen minutes, pressure started falling off again. “That means the sand is hitting the perfs,” Rankin said.

Outside, night was falling, and a set of portable stadium lights came on. Rankin had his men gradually increase the fluid’s viscosity and the diameter of the grains of proppant, to create a better conduit for the oil to flow back out. “I like to bring it up from about a lotion to a molasses,” Rankin said. Every time he altered the mixture, a first-year worker—a “worm,” distinguished by his green hard hat—appeared, bearing a fresh sample in a plastic cup, and performed a test. First, he tilted the cup so that the frack fluid formed a rubbery lip, a couple of inches long, that hung suspended in air. Then he touched the lip to Rankin’s hand, to see that his skin remained dry. Finally, he flipped the sample into another cup and checked that no traces remained in the first. By the time the concentration was at its highest level, the fluid was like an elastic peanut butter and could hold a lip nearly as tall as the cup. “That’s a Gene Simmons tongue,” Rankin said approvingly.

In another week, after the fracturing trucks were moved off, the Abe underwent three days of “flowback” treatment, to pump out the fracking fluid before oil recovery began. The first night, employees saw flares ten feet tall rising from the well. “If there’s that much gas running through it before you’re even pumping oil, usually you’re getting a good well,” Rankin said. The well came on line with an initial production of 1,847 barrels a day. “I’d say we’re very pleased,” Rankin said.

The land the Abe well runs beneath was once inhabited by a Norwegian family named Ellingson, which claimed six adjacent homestead plots. I learned from a visit to the records vault of the county courthouse that in 1907 the U.S. government had deeded a hundred and sixty acres to Ed Ellingson for the sum of two hundred dollars. Soon, four of his brothers—Sievert, Albert, Miller, and Ole—settled around him.

Life on the frontier was hard. In 1913, Ed was killed by a passing train as he tried to shoo cattle off the tracks. His father got his estate: the land, plus “one horse named Cooley, one old binder, household furniture, one old wagon, one bobsled, one hay rake, and blacksmith tools,” according to a typewritten deed. Sievert’s wife died the same year, while he was working in the fields. Sievert wanted to build up a herd of Herefords, “but the drought made all pastures inadequate,” his son, Elmer, explained in an account published in 1975 by the county historical society. “Crops failed repeatedly. . . . There were years we had to borrow money for seed grain.” Eventually, Sievert, his brother Miller, and their families moved to Minnesota. Another brother, Albert, ended up with many of the family’s acres but failed to pay taxes on his property, and in 1942 it was repossessed by the government.

The land seemed to have given the Ellingsons little in return for their labor. But the last court filing, dated March, 2010—just a month before Brigham’s drilling rig was in place—revealed that there was a holdout: a young housewife and mother who lives in Williston. (The woman asked not to be named, in order to maintain her privacy.) She was a descendant of Ole Ellingson, one of the five original homesteading brothers, whose family had retained a large share of mineral rights even after much of the property was seized.

The woman and two siblings had been given the rights by their grandmother, an Ellingson widow. “I didn’t hear much about North Dakota from my grandmother growing up—she moved out of the state when I was very young, when her first husband passed away,” she said. The woman leased the rights to Brigham. The arrangement will likely pay the family several hundred thousand dollars a year.

The family had attempted to sell the rights once before. “Around ’98 or ’99, my grandmother had a couple of medical procedures,” the woman said. “She was going through a financially difficult time.” The only buyer her grandmother could suggest was a tenant farmer who was taking care of the land. “I called the gentleman, but he wasn’t interested,” the woman said. “She was asking ten thousand dollars. I guess I can see how it didn’t sound like such a great deal at the time.” ♦